After 36 hrs and a severely damaged viral campaign. Today we got back this apathetic response:

Hi guys,

I apologize for the delay in getting back in touch. I ran this past various teams at YouTube and their feedback was the following: Content containing mild violence, sexual or other provocative content may not show up when using Safety Mode.

Unfortunately that’s about all they’re able to provide — they also shared this link with me in case it helps to have more context on safety mode.

I apologize I’m not able to help more on this issue but appreciate your patience.

Thank you,
Sara

The irony is that ALL but one of our VidAngel videos are blocked in “safety mode”, not just the viral one we released with G/PG paintball marker mild “violence”.

There is no option for appeal. Another rep (who is on our side and trying to help without luck) said that YouTube doesn’t even have a department for this kind of problem.

This response is coming to a team which has signed off on millions upon millions in YouTube advertising spend over the past 4 years (Orabrush, Orapup, PooPourri, Endorse Liberty Super PAC…). In the past I’ve always been impressed with YouTube’s willingness to help on this kind of stuff, but this time I am getting nothing but apathy.

If you are concerned and want to help, you can voice your concern to Google here on this forum.

A lot of people ask us if we have to go through each VidAngel movie ourselves to edit them. The answer is no. VidAngel filters are crowd-sourced. We have over 3000 trained taggers who go through movies and YouTube videos tagging them for content.

We also have a “no taking one for the team” rule. Everyone who tags VidAngel videos is required to agree to never tag any content they would not already watch if they were not doing it for VidAngel. There are plenty of people in the world who will watch all movies, leave the tagging of content you don’t feel comfortable watching to others.